In the City of Sylvia begins with an apple, an orange, and a map. A man—scruffy, tormented, a romantic no doubt, suggesting a young Rimbaud or Modigliani—sits on a bed, scribbling on a notepad with the quiet desperation of someone who is blocked, trying to regain time or something lost to memory. At a coffee shop, an epic search begins. A waitress bungles an order, and amidst the din of finicky requests and cups and glasses tumbling over, a tale of passion—told in a voluptuous language of spatial-temporal equations—is born, passionately and unpretentiously. The desperately-looking man, let us call him Él (Xavier Lafitte), is unfazed by the noise or the shadows cast by the sun, transfixed by hordes of women—their lips, eyes, hair, immaculate curves—before taking pencil to paper. And so an abstract portrait of an artist as a young lover begins.